229 A Game Centered Around Collection

[Chain Side Quest 1.2: Spirit Legacy Inheritor (Incomplete)

Spirit Grade Difficulty: D

Objective) Reach the Sky Seizing Castle's third floor.

Optional Objective) Pass a Substation Trial.

Description: Upon returning to the Sky Seizing Castle, the conquest for the Castle Lord's legacy continues. With the first floor closed off, how will you fare against the Substation Trials designed for Transcendent Foundation and Foundation Collapse Stage Cultivators? Struggle, train, and persist through the Trials and make it to the third floor for a special reward!]

Elizabeth dismissed the Quest notification as her attention was drawn to what was below her feet. Through the mysticism of the Castle Formation Arrays, she could see the first floor of the round room through a translucent floor. Either the first floor dropped a level to match the hallway leading to the Exchange Hub and other rooms in the castle or all the other rooms rose to the second floor. In any case, Elizabeth didn't care to investigate.

She turned to Yrre and asked, "Are you going to wait for me here, or…"

"I'll stay in this room until you finish acquiring tickets. As the Castle Lord's Honorary Disciple, you have to challenge his Trials by yourself," Yrre said.

"Hmm… where to go first," Elizabeth grumbled as she looked through the doors to the substations.

'If I started with testing my Understanding of Energies, the obvious answer is to start with Water and either follow that with Yin or Time, complete all the other energy sources I'm studying and then take the Foundation or Chaos Trial. But I could also test my Secondary Occupations, check and use some tickets to explore the parts of the Castle I failed to reach last time thanks to being too eager,' she thought.

"Where do you recommend I start?" Elizabeth asked Yrre.

"I'd recommend that you start with the Water Substation first. Your Understanding of Water is already far beyond what is expected of a Transcendent Foundation Stage Cultivator and you don't even have a cultivation method for it. If you take the Water Substation first, even if you don't get the highest rating, I doubt you'll do poorly. With whatever rewards you get from the Trial, I'm sure you'll have at least enough to go to the Exchange Hub and trade for a proper Cultivation Method. Then with whatever else remains you should still have enough to visit the Meditation Chamber and make the most of your next substation."

"What about with these?" Elizabeth asked as she produced the four remaining Unmarked Grey Tickets she had acquired from her first visit.

"Those…" Yrre shook her head, "are useless to you at this point. The most you'd be able to get from them are low-level resources of Mortal Grade quality."

Elizabeth sighed as she put away her Grey Tickets. She didn't want to continue wasting time, so she followed through with Yrre's suggestion and walked towards the Water Substation, thinking, 'Even in the worst case, Water is not and will not be an Energy I major in.'

As surreal as she remembered from her first visit, the moment she entered the seemingly blank white room, it was like she was cast away to a completely separate place. Though unlike the magnificent road to the Ancient Timepiece in the Time Substation or the void of darkness in the Space Substation, the Water Substation was by far the least abstract.

Elizabeth reappeared hovering in the air, overlooking a massive winding river that led to a waterfall. The river easily spanned a hundred kilometers while the waterfall was over ten kilometers tall. Though aside from the two bodies of water, all she could see was a void of white as if the river and waterfall were cut away from the rest of reality.

From afar, the waterfall seemed harmless enough. Though, to Spirit Realm Cultivator like Elizabeth, whose visual prowess could scan the environment from dozens of kilometers away and see with microscopic clarity, it was a tyrannical monstrosity with inexplicable power. The waterfall looked to be dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of water per second. Add to that the undoubtedly Law-charged waters and the waterfall might as well be considered a zone of certain death to non-Cultivators.

[Foundation Trial of Water

Cross the Profound River to the best of your ability and ascend the Waterfall of Insight if possible. Performance will be graded on the time taken to complete each task or where you stand at the point of the Trial concluding.

Time Remaining: 23H 59M 59S]

Dismissing the prompt, Elizabeth was alerted by her Spiritual Sense. There was an invisible barrier that did not allow her dormant Spiritual Sense past five meters in any direction except towards the river below. Upon further investigation, the barrier not only obstructed her Spiritual Sense, but her physical body couldn't fly over the length of the river either.

"Down it is," she muttered.

When she hit the river, she was surprised to find that the waters were knee-deep at most.

'Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it got deeper the further across the river I made it,' she thought.

She couldn't escape the waters with flight or backtrack away from the waterfall as the barrier she felt earlier seemed to limit her action, thus the only option was to head towards the waterfall.

Elizabeth ran through the first thirty kilometers at a brisk mach-speed jog. She didn't want to risk going higher than that in case the waters suddenly grew deeper or the flat ground under the water turned rugged. But at the thirty-kilometer mark, she had to suddenly stop. The reason for her stop was as unexpected as it was pleasant.

"Is that…" Elizabeth didn't even finish as a Status prompt converted the incredulous look on her face into a smile.

[Status

Name: Water Tablet Shard of Speed

Spirit Grade: F

Description: A fragment of the SSS Spirit Grade Water Tablet of Flow. Holding the introductory portion of the Water Tablet of Flow, Mortal Realm Practitioners may study the images and script in this fragment to reach a high enough Understanding of Water to break through to the Spirit Realm and learn the basics of Seamless Water Steps — A Movement Water-type Skill.]

Without Persephone's help, Elizabeth scanned the contents of the Water Tablet Shard of Speed into her memory by galvanizing her Spiritual Sea. For the next ten minutes, she went through the motions of the image and focused on the insights contained in the physical script before a Skill was registered by her Status Functions.

[Skills:

Water Art: Seamless Water Steps

Level 1

Experience: 1,055,000/1,097,448

Spirit Grade: F

Energy Cost: 0.1 True Qi per hour

Description: A Movement Water-type Skill created to make the most out of Water Energies to bolster the user's speed. Centered around the Concept of Flow, this Skill, in its infancy, merely reduces the effects of friction on the user's body, over time and with proficiency overcoming more factors of resistance to lead the user to the pinnacle of their speed.

Primary Effect: Increases Speed by 1%.

Secondary Effect: The effects of all forms of friction on the user's body decrease by 50%.]

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"It's no Cultivation Method, but it'll be good enough to make progressing in this Substation easier. Plus, I don't think there's such a thing as having too many Movement-type Skills," Elizabeth muttered before applying the Seamless Water Steps as she continued her run.

Ignoring Seamless Water Step's Primary Effect, its current level of friction reduction increased Elizabeth's control over her speed to an almost comical level. It almost left her dreading the fate of the next thing she decided to test her augmented attacking speed on. Almost…

Five kilometers later and Elizabeth began struggling. Her speed started declining as she felt the resistance of the water she walked through start to suppress her. By the time she made it forty-kilometers in total, she was hardly moving faster than a regular car on Earth.

However, at the forty-kilometer mark, another Water Tablet Shard came into view. A Status Appraisal revealed it to be the Water Tablet Shard of Strength.

The second Tablet Shard didn't teach her any new Skills, nor was it a Cultivation Method. It only added to the information she found in the first Water Tablet Shard of Speed. Increasing the depth of the profound content, giving rise to new mysteries of the Water Laws for Elizabeth to study, but most surprisingly of all, adding a tertiary effect to the Seamless Water Steps.

[Skills:

Water Art: Seamless Water Steps

Level 3

…

Primary Effect: Increases Speed by 3%.

Secondary Effect: The effects of all forms of friction on the user's body decrease by 51.5%

Tertiary Effect: The effects of water resistance on the user's body decrease by 103%]

'Fascinating,' Elizabeth thought, 'To think that a Skill could be upgraded to such an extent with just a couple tweaks to the insights used…'

Even as a Cultivator majoring in Time and Chaos, this being the first time she saw the practical uses of her Understanding in action left her more excited than she would have imagined for the Water Substation. It even reached the point that she continued to practice the Seamless Water Steps by the Water Tablet Shard of Strength for over an hour. She remained until she felt she could only improve by treading harsher waters.

After leaving to venture onward towards the waterfall, it immediately became apparent how useful the new tertiary effect of the Seamless Water Steps would be in her effort to advance in the Substation Trial.

From the forty kilometer point onward, the winding Profound River's knee-deep waters began to gradually increase by about an inch every kilometer. The increase in water might have slowed Elizabeth down to a disheartening degree in the past, but now she could effortlessly cruise through the waters even as it crept up her body.

At that fifty kilometer point, however, the deepening waters and ever-increasingly complex mysteries obstructing her, caused her speed to decline to the state she was at before learning from the Water Tablet Shard of Strength. By the fifty-fifth kilometer, Elizabeth couldn't even jog.

Still, the Water Substation Trial had only begun. Elizabeth had more than twenty hours to use what she learned from the Seamless Water Steps to make increasing her Understanding of Water in the Profound River easier. Moreover, the possibility of more Water Tablet Shards being scattered ahead left her morale as high as can be.